by G J Ogden
Come on, cut the engines already, before they explode! she urged, speaking the words only in her mind, since the pressure on her chest and lungs made the effort of talking too great. Finally, the engine cut out and instantly the force pushing her back into the chair vanished, as did the strain on her weary body. The alarm stopped sounding, but her panel still showed an alert indicating that critical damage had been sustained to the main engine.
“Tell me something I don’t already know,” complained Maria, dismissing the warning; there was no sense in worrying about it now, because she was already all in. The shuttle completed its deceleration program by slowly spinning the nose back towards the planet, which filled almost the entire view through the cockpit glass.
The meds that Angela had given her had started to wear off during the flight from the moon base to the planet and, combined with the strain of the hard deceleration, she was feeling drained. Her sister had given her an additional supply of meds, but Maria was reluctant to take them, because of the debilitating early side-effects. Instead, she took two stim tablets from the arm of her chair and popped them onto her tongue, where they liquefied instantly. The effects hit moments later, boosting Maria’s senses and awareness and dulling the increasing fatigue and weariness that had begun to take over her body and mind. She coughed and it felt like needles had been driven into her chest and throat.
Come on, Sal, just hold it together for a little while longer.
The navigation console bleeped to indicate that the ship had reached the next phase of its approach. Maria cleared her throat, which required several painful attempts, and then she clicked on the commlink.
“UEC control, I am starting my approach planetside.”
There was a short delay and then Page answered. “Hey, Sal. How are you holding up?”
Maria smiled. “I’m doing fine, control. But you really need to brush up on your comms talk, Karl.”
“Yeah, well I’m just a blue boot, remember? I leave all this fancy flying stuff to you guys.”
Maria adjusted a number of controls in sequence and the shuttle altered its course and began to enter the atmosphere of the planet. She placed her right hand on the control yoke, ready to compensate should the shuttle’s battered systems cause it to stray off course.
“Sal, this is Ashley. Remember to check your entry angle and make sure that the new hull plating absorbs the brunt of the energy, got it?”
“Understood, Ashley. Don’t worry, your flight plan is flawless. I’ll admit, it’s even better than I could have done.”
“You were always happier flying on instincts, Sal. But this time, just stick to the plan, okay?”
“I’m entering the atmosphere now and starting final checks on the drone array,” Maria said, ignoring Ashley’s fussing. “I have to say, it makes a nice change to be doing this without being pursued or fired at for once.”
“Everything looks good with your course from here, Sal. What’s the status of your core?”
Maria checked the systems status panel. She had muted the alerts, since there had been so many of them, and the piercing alarms were making her already fierce headache even worse. The stims had at least helped to ease her head, but nothing could change the fact that the old shuttle was a flying wreck. She scrolled through the different sections, most of which were highlighted in amber, with several in red, until she reached the engine core readout. The whole screen was surrounded in a bright red border, which painted a rectangular square of light onto her pale, clammy face. She muted the commlink and blew out an exasperated sigh, then cleared her throat again and un-muted the commlink.
“It’s just about holding up, control. I’ll be fine,” Maria lied. The stresses on the hull were growing and the ship began to shimmy and shake, while the view outside of the cockpit was consumed by an orange-red glow.
“Understood. We’re going to lose communications soon, Sal. We all just wanted to say…” Then there was a pause, which was filled only by static.
“I understand, control,” Maria said, after the silence persisted. They had already said their goodbyes on the deck in the spaceport, and despite everything Maria had gone though, it had still hit her hard. She didn’t want to get swamped by those emotions again.
Maria checked the readouts again. Her course was drifting slightly, forcing her to make several minute corrections, which required all of her focus, but it at least helped to take her mind off the fact that she would soon lose contact with Ashley and Karl for good. The status panel for the drone array completed its diagnostic; it was primed and ready.
“At least something on this bucket is working,” laughed Maria, but her high spirits were short-lived as the commlink panel flashed to show the signal was about to be lost. She had already said everything that needed to be said, but as she hurtled through the atmosphere and the commlink threatened to dis-connect, she realized there was still something that she’d been hiding from them, as well as from herself. The truth was that she did consider this to be her penance. She believed it to be the universe balancing itself out for her failure to prevent the destruction of the GPS space station, and for the deaths of Diana and Raina and all the others who had lost their lives. The deaths were on Kurren, that much she accepted, but she also knew the guilt she carried would never leave her. At least this way, the pain would not last for much longer.
Page’s voice came over the commlink again, distorted and distant-sounding. “Sal, we’re about to lose contact, are you still there?”
Maria took a deep breath and then opened the commlink for the final time. “Karl, I’m sorry that this is as far as I could go with you, but I know you will make it the rest of the way, and I know you’ll make it right. Take care… Maria Salus, out.”
The commlink crackled and returned static. Maria checked the status panel and saw that the signal link to the UEC moon base had been severed; she reached across and turned the commlink off and then sat back in her command chair. She had been terrified at this stage of atmospheric entry on the previous two occasions, but this time she felt calm and oddly at ease. The orange glow outside filtered away and Maria again saw the azure sky of the planet above the blanket of piercing white clouds. But it didn’t last for long; she was chasing the terminator and would soon pass into darkness.
Alarms rang out in the cockpit again, bringing Maria’s senses into sharp focus, not without a little help from the stims that were making her heart race and mind fizz. Checking the damage control console, she saw that the core had ruptured and was venting coolant, and the main engines were on the verge of total failure. She acted quickly, reducing power to the main engines and lowering the reactor output to the minimum required to keep her in the sky for as long as necessary. Then she grabbed the control yoke and took manual control, aiming for the probe deployment point indicated by the heads-up display holo. The ship responded sluggishly to her inputs, jerking and shimmying as she moved the yoke.
“Come on, just hold together for a few more minutes!” Maria shouted at the ship as she wrestled with the controls.
The deployment point was just ahead and Maria managed to tear a hand away from the control yoke for long enough to decompress the rear compartment, which contained the probe array. The rear hatch blew outward and Maria again had to fight with the controls as air rushed inside, buffeting the ship even more violently.
5000 meters to the drop point…
Another alarm rang out, though it barely registered above the roar of the wind flooding the cabin. Maria again flicked her eyes across to the damage control console and quickly scanned the new warnings, but the list of alerts made for deeply uncomfortable reading.
Fuel Containment: Failing, 25%
Core Containment: Failing, 20%
Life Support: Failed
Aft Thruster 3: Failed
Communications: Failed
And the list went on.
2500 meters to the drop point.
She could see flames trailing from the port wing – an electrical fire res
ulting from one of the numerous failing systems – and she was losing altitude too. She increased power to the thrusters and felt the ship kick upwards, but then another explosion jolted the ship and the familiar whine of the alarm sounded once more.
Maria cursed. “Okay, okay, I get it!”
500 meters to the drop point.
She prized a hand off the control yoke and grabbed the manual release for the probe array, which had been crudely installed in a hurry by the engineers on the moon base. She took a deep breath of the thin air inside the cockpit and counted down the release.
“Three… two… one… drop!”
Maria yanked the crude lever upwards and then tilted the nose of the shuttle above the horizon; the probes began to slide out in clusters, exactly as planned, forming into groups and then shooting off over the horizon, like streaks of sunlight poking through a curtain into a darkened room. The shuttle continued to lose altitude and with the nose titled upwards, it was rapidly losing velocity too. She glanced back; perhaps just over half of the probes had been deployed.
“Come on!” Maria shouted at the ship. “Work faster!”
A louder and more elemental alarm sounded, like the shriek of some sort of wild and terrible beast, but in stark contrast to the urgency of the alarm, the corresponding message seemed almost comically civilized.
Containment failure imminent. Eject core immediately.
Below the message was a pulsating red button, containing a single word.
Affirm
Ninety percent of the probes had now been deployed. “Close enough…”
Maria reached over to the damage control panel and hit the pulsating red button, feeling an immediate kick from behind and beneath her chair as the core was shot out into the sky like a bullet, and then every system went dead. Seconds later the core detonated creating a brilliant blue star in the night sky, which was born and died in the blink of an eye. The shock wave hit moments later, rocking the ship as violently as during atmospheric entry, but with the power core gone the alarms had been silenced and all Maria could hear was the roar of the wind and the thump of her pulse in her ears.
Glancing behind at the cube-shaped honeycomb of metal bars, Maria confirmed that all the probes had been released, and she sat back in the chair and smiled, feeling a near overwhelming sense of satisfaction wash over her. If the probes worked as planned, it would mean the end of the Maddening, and it would also mean the planetsiders, and the few hundred survivors – all that remained of GPS – would live on.
The shuttle stalled, jerking Maria back into action and robbing her of her elated sensation. She angled the nose back down, picking up forward velocity. Without the reactor, the ancient UEC shuttle was barely more than a falling lump of metal, and the only thing that Maria could rely on was the aerodynamics of un-powered flight, a subject that had been covered academically during her training, but not one she had ever expected to apply in practice.
The terrain below was rocky and mountainous and not ideal for landing a soaring hunk of metal, but then out of the port-side window she spotted a long, black lake, shimmering under the silver moonlit sky, and she banked the shuttle towards it. Maria’s heart rate climbed further, almost as rapidly as the ship lost altitude, but incredibly the controls responded and the battered and broken shuttle carved an arc through the sky, lining up with the watery runway.
Altitude 1000 meters.
Maria yanked down hard on her straps, making them as tight as possible, and braced herself. The electrical fire on the port wing had spread, and now the entire port side was ablaze, trailing a fiery tail behind her, like a soaring phoenix.
300 meters.
The murky water filled her entire view outside and Maria pulled back hard on the yoke, trying to slow her descent, but the edge of the lake loomed ahead and Maria knew then that she had overshot. There was nothing more she could do, other than press her eyes tightly together, roll the dice, and see where they fell.
The shuttle hit the water like a skimming stone, bouncing back up and then hammering down again, but instead of water it was grinding across gravel and stone, until finally the shuttle collided with a towering cluster of rocks, stopping it dead, like a fly hitting a spider’s web. The broken and burnt metal creaked, groaned and hissed and then came to rest, silent and still, on the shore of the black lake. Inside, Maria Salus was slumped forward in the chair, blood trickling from her head and falling silently to the metal decking, like crimson tears.
Chapter 34
The explosion and resulting shockwave from the shuttle’s ejected power core brought Yuna racing out onto the veranda and to Ethan’s side.
“What was that?” she asked, with a mixture of nervousness and excitement as the rumble of the explosion echoed softly in the distance.
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know. There was a bright blue flash and then I heard the explosion. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He was peering at the area of sky where the explosion had occurred, searching for the other, smaller white trails of light that had preceded the flash, but they had all disappeared.
“What are you looking for?”
“Before the explosion, I saw… lights,” said Ethan, unsure of exactly how to describe what he’d witnessed.
“Lights, like the ones you told us about? Like from the hermit’s folk stories?”
Ethan shook his head again. “No, they were different somehow, like they were flying, not falling.”
Yuna frowned and followed Ethan’s gaze up into the sky, trying to spot these mysterious lights, and then she noticed something, like the glint of sunlight reflected in a window, bright and sharp and moving quickly across the horizon.
“Was it like that?” said Yuna, pointing to the orange shimmer in the sky.
Ethan saw it. “No, not exactly, but what is that, it seems to be coming this way?”
“Another fragment of the space station, perhaps?” suggested Yuna, but then she discounted her own idea. “No, it’s moving horizontally, like it’s flying towards us.”
The realization struck Ethan like a knife to the gut.
“It’s a ship!” he said, feeling the dread sensation in his gut spill out to the rest of his body. The glowing object grew larger and closer, and caught the moonlight. It was definitely a ship, and it was on fire and falling fast.
“It looks like the shuttle Page and Ashley arrived in, but it has no power!” Yuna cried, gripping the metal railing in front of her as if to stop herself from falling. “It’s going to crash!”
A feeling of helplessness gripped Ethan; there was literally nothing he could do but watch as the shuttle soared lower, trailed by orange flame and black smoke, and impacted on the surface of the water, kicking up a cloud of white spray that contrasted starkly against the black water and doused the flames in an instant. The shuttle bounced back into the air for a brief moment before crashing down hard and skimming across the gravel shoreline until it collided with the rocks with a brutal crunch, a few hundred meters from the lab-oratory.
Ethan turned to Yuna and grabbed her shoulders. “Yuna, go back inside and make sure Gaia and Summer are safe!”
Yuna’s startled eyes met Ethan’s and then narrowed. “Why, what are you going to do?”, but before Ethan could answer, Yuna had already read his expression and seen the determination in his eyes. “Ethan, there could still be more of the maddened out there! The serum we pumped through the lab’s air-conditioning system would have only been vented a short distance outside.”
“They could still be alive, Yuna,” Ethan said urgently. “It could be Page and Ashley, or even Maria. I have to help them. Protect the others, I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
Yuna tried to protest again, but Ethan had already run to the fence bordering the veranda and vaulted it, jumping down onto the rocks on the opposite side, and sliding and scrambling to the stony shoreline below. He pulled the pistol from his belt and ran for the crashed ship, feeling the stab of the sharp stones und
erfoot dig into the soles of his travel-worn boots with each frantic stride, but as he closed on the wreck of the shuttle, he saw it was already not alone. Two shadowy figures appeared on the rocks above the crippled hulk, and started to slowly slide down onto the rocky shore. Ethan ran harder, pumping his arms and legs and sucking in the cold night air, which burned his lungs as if it were liquid fire. The figures turned to face him, and illuminated by the bright moonlight he recognized their gray, mottled skin, elongated faces, sinewy hair and black eyes.
Ethan tried to stop, but slipped on the loose stones and stumbled over, dropping the pistol, which clattered across the stony shoreline. He scrambled to his feet and searched for the weapon, but before he could reach it the closest of the two creatures ran at him. Ethan grabbed a rock and prepared to fight, but then to his surprise the creature also stumbled on the loose stones and fell, landing awkwardly and letting out a low, dull groan, before climbing slowly back to its feet. Ethan scrambled over to the pistol and raised it at the creature, pulling the trigger. But there was nothing. He tried again and again, but the weapon did not fire.
The safety! He realized, and tried to think back to what the hermit had shown him, twisting the pistol around in his hands looking for the switch. The creature was still loping towards him, but its gait was abnormal, even for one of the maddened, and it moved at half the speed Ethan expected. He backed away from it, still twisting the pistol in his hand, until he spotted the lever towards the rear of the weapon and clicked it with his thumb, revealing a small red dot. Raising the pistol again he shot the approaching figure in the chest at almost point-blank range; the crack of the weapon rang out in the still night, startling Ethan almost as much as the sudden appearance of the creature. It reeled back as black-red blood oozed from the wound, but instead of continuing its attack, oblivious to the injury as Ethan had witnessed other maddened creatures do, it merely stood and watched the liquid seep from its body. Then with one final, dark glower into Ethan’s eyes, it fell to its knees and collapsed onto its back, staring blankly up at the open sky.